Prison time, felony charges rare for artifact and relic looters
By Mike Stark, Salt Lake City, Utah (AP)
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Jeanne and Jericca Redd |
Stepping into the afternoon sun
during September, Jeanne Redd
and her daughter Jericca walked
away from a federal courthouse
with probation papers – not
prison time – for their role in
the theft and illegal
trafficking of Indian artifacts.
Some, including one of the Salt
Lake City’s daily newspapers,
expressed frustration that the
judge didn’t come down harder on
the duo from southern Utah.
History however says the
punishment for the Redds, who
pleaded guilty to several
felonies, was fairly typical.
Despite high-profile arrests and
indictments, most people
convicted of illegally digging
up, collecting and cashing in on
artifacts in the United States
don’t go to prison.
And for those that do, most are
in for a year or less, according
to a 10-year analysis of
prosecutions under a 1979 law
meant to punish those that foul
the country’s cultural
resources.
In Jeanne Redd’s case,
prosecutors had sought at least
18 months in prison. She’s among
26 people charged after a
federal sting operation that
lasted more than two years and
included hundreds of
transactions between an
undercover agent and buyers and
sellers from Utah, New Mexico
and Colorado.
At sentencing, U.S. District
Judge Clark Waddoups gave her
three years probation and a
$2,000 fine for seven felony
counts of plundering artifacts
from tribal and federal lands.
She and her daughter, who got
two years of probation, had
already surrendered a collection
of more than 800 artifacts
ranging from exquisite pottery
and decorative pendants to human
remains.
The sentences didn’t surprise
Robert Palmer, an archaeologist
and former academic who analyzed
Archaeological Resources
Protection Act prosecutions from
1996 to 2005.
His analysis, published in an
obscure law journal in 2007,
found that of the 83 people
found guilty, 20 went to prison
and 13 of those received
sentences of a year or less.
Palmer also found that while
prosecutors were successful in
the cases they took on, they
turned away about a third of the
cases they got, mostly because
of weak evidence or a lack of
clear criminal intent.
Those
refusals – along with a lack of
manpower and other priorities
for investigators – are part of
the reason why “we are
witnessing the wholesale
stripping and selling off for
scrap our collective American
heritage,” said Palmer, who now
works as the senior law
enforcement ranger at Effigy
Mounds National Monument in
Iowa.
“People might see these as
insignificant but over time,
you’re removing context, you’re
removing significance, you’re
removing the lens of the future
to look back at the past,” he
said.
On average, 840 looting cases
are reported each year – more
than two per day – across
federal land managed by the
National Park Service, the U.S.
Forest Service, U.S. Bureau of
Land Management and the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service,
according to Todd Swain, the
Park Service’s lone investigator
on cultural crimes.
There are certainly more cases
that are either never discovered
or never reported, he said.
“Lord knows what the scope of
the problem actually is,” he
said. “But clearly the numbers
we do have are seriously under
what’s going on.”
Of the cases reported, only
about 14 percent ever get
solved. Roughly 94 percent of
violators walk away with
misdemeanor tickets, said Swain,
who examined records from 1996
to 2005.
Some of those are minor cases
worthy only of a misdemeanor
citation but “a bunch” could
probably be pursued as felony
cases – those that result in
damage of $500 or more – if
there were the time and
resources to conduct a lengthier
investigation, Swain said.
“ARPA investigations can be as
complex as murder cases,” Swain
said in his 2007 analysis which,
like Palmer’s, appeared in the
Yearbook of Cultural Property
Law.
Often those cases require
archaeological expertise, weeks
or months of investigation and
prosecutors with the time and
inclination to take on the cases
with a portion of federal law
they’re not always familiar
with.
A park service program to train
federal prosecutors lasted for
12 years before it was
discontinued in 2003. Swain said
most of those who were trained
have either left the office or
taken on other assignments. The
program resumed last month and
Swain is hoping it’s going to
continue.
Despite a push in recent decades
to get tougher on artifact
looters, there are no
significant signs that
prosecutions or punishments are
having any major effect on
looting, especially those that
steal for commercial purposes.
“The numbers should be going
down,” said Swain, who has
investigated more than 30
archaeological looting cases.
“That’s definitely not the
case.”